painfully true, totally funny

Being in your twenties in 2014 has a totally different meaning than it did, say, even ten years ago. Once, it meant freedom, shedding adolescent skin and stepping out of your parent's basement and striking out on your own. But then, the housing market gave way, interest on student loans shot up, Lena Dunham became the poster girl for twenty-somethings who just couldn't get it together, and suddenly, the twenties became a drunken, wise-cracking way to prolong the teenage years. This narrative has, until recently, always belonged to the boys; Judd Apatow films, James Franco, How I Met Your Mother, et. al. But a recent spate of new films have given a rise to the girl-child, the messy, not-quite-together and not-all-that-flattering depiction of young women who are lost in the sea of adulthood. (Girls, to say the least, but also Adult World, Obvious Child, and Frances Ha, come to mind.) And now, there is Laggies. In it, Keira Knightley plays that perfectly imperfect, lost twenty-something, except she finds herself literally being able to revert back to adolescence by becoming besties with teenaged Chloe Grace Moretz.

To celebrate the fact that being a grown up doesn't happen immediately when someone wakes up on the morning of their 18th (or 21st, or 25th) birthday, it is important to remember to celebrate the horrible, hilarious, and kind of universal mistakes everyone makes in their twenties. The seven dudes that you date in your twenties isn't, you know, canon — but it sure is close. A couple that this writer might be able to add: The Overly Judgmental Music Snob, The Constantly Eats-In-His-Bed And Never Changes His Sheets, and The Annoyingly Successful Artist (Why?! Why does everyone love him so?!).